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Part 2 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —

Part 1 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —

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Story 1bama Spy Scandal: Obama Administration Officials Including National Security Adviser Rice, CIA Director Brennan and United Nations Ambassador Power Spied On American People and Trump Campaign By Massive Unmasking Using Intelligence Community For Political Purposes — An Abuse of Power and Felonies Under U.S. Law — Videos

Story 1: Trump Targets Transgender Troops — No More Gender Reassignment Surgeries In Military and Veterans Hospital — Cuts Spending By Millions Per Year — What is Next? — No More Free Viagra — Tranny Boys/Girls No More — Videos —

Story 2: Senate Fails To Pass Senator Rand Paul’s Total Repeal Amendment — Tea Party Revival Calling For Primary Challenge Against Rollover Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dick Heller of Nevada, John McCain of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — All Republicans in Name Only — Really Big Government Democrats — Videos —

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Story 2: Congress Overwhelming Passes New Sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea — Long Overdue — Videos —

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Story 1: “Obamacare Failed” Says President Trump — Wants Obamacare Completely Repealed and Replaced Sooner or Later — Obama Lied To American People — Does President Trump Understand The Relationship Between Pre-existing Conditions, Guaranteed Issue, Community Rating and Adverse Selection — Many Doubt Trump Really Understands The Relationship That Is The Real Reason Obamacare Was Designed To Fail From The Beginning So It Could Be Replaced By Single Payer Government Health Care — Videos

Story 1: Will Trump Challenge The Washington Establishment To Achieve His Promises? You Betcha. Will He Win? Long Shot –A Movement Is Not A Viable Political Party That Can Beat The Democratic Party and Republican Party and Their Allies In The Big Government Bureaucracies, Big Lie Media and The Owner Donor Class — Votes Count — Independence Party???– Videos —

Story 2: Replace Republicans With D and F Conservative Review Grades and Scores Root and Branch With Real Conservatives, Classical Liberals and Libertarians Until New Political Party Is Formed and Becomes A Viable Party — Videos

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Story 2: Estimated insolvency date of Social Security’s Trust fund is 2034 — and Medicare’s Hospital Trust Fund is 2029 — Social Security and Medicare Benefits Will Be Cut or Taxes Raised or Combination of Benefit Cuts and Tax Increases — Videos —

Story 3: Trump’s Broken Promises and Kept Promises — Good Intentions are Not Enough — Only Results Count — Videos

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Story 2: Republican Sellout The Republican Voter Base By Not Repealing Obamacare Completely — Leaves Many Obamacare Regulations, Subsidies, and Taxes In Place –Republican Replacement of Obamacare Is A Big Bailout Bill of Insurance Industry — The Stupid Republican Party About To Commit Political Suicide — Rest In Peace — Videos

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Story 2: When Will Attorney General Sessions Appoint A Special Counsel To Investigate Intelligence Community Leaks and Hillary Clinton Mishandling of Classified Documents and Related Pay for Play Public Corruption of Clinton Foundation? — Was Democratic Hired Opposition Research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steel Formerly of British Intelligent MI-6 Agent A Cutout For The Russian Disinformation Campaign Included in The Donald Trump — Russia Dossier? — Videos

Ann Coulter owns Whoopi Goldberg on Race and White Guilt

Ann Coulter on the Democratic Party and her muslim boyfriend

Couric vs. Coulter

Ann Coulter documentary (2004)

The Best Ann Coulter Insults at the Rob Lowe Roast

How Trump Betrayed Ann Coulter on Immigration

The political commentator may be more committed to the Republican nominee’s platform than he is.

PETER BEINART

AUG 26, 2016

Donald Trump has just betrayed Ann Coulter. Which is a dangerous thing to do.This week, Coulter released her new book, In Trump We Trust. As the title suggests, it’s a defense of Trump. But more than that, it’s a defense of Trumpism. Most Trump surrogates contort themselves to defend whatever The Donald says, no matter its ideological content. They’re like communist party functionaries. They get word from the ideologists on high, and regurgitate it as best they can.

Coulter is different. She’s an ideologist herself. She realized the potency of the immigration issue among conservatives before Trump did. On June 1 of last year, she released Adios America, which devotes six chapters to the subject of immigrants and rape. Two weeks later, Trump—having received an advanced copy—famously picked up the thread in his announcement speech.

Since then, they’ve been allies. But unlike many Trump defenders, Coulter makes clear that her primary allegiance is not to Trump the man. It’s to the nostalgic “Make America White Again” brand of conservatism that she began peddling even before he did. In In Trump We Trust, Coulter calls Trump a “tasteless, publicity-seeking, coarse billionaire” and argues that, “the one thing voters weren’t wild about was his personality.”

The secret of Trump’s success, she argues, has been ideological. He recognized that “Americans,” by which she mostly means Republicans, “are homesick.” They don’t just oppose immigration because they believe it depresses wages and strains government services. They’re homesick for a whiter America, an America that was once truly free because “it’s not in the Anglo-Saxon character either to take orders or to give them.” (Never mind about slavery.) Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing more immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has been, according to Coulter in In Trump We Trust, overrun by “illiterate peasants … who can be instructed to learn certain symbols and bloc-vote for the Democrats.” In response, Democrats, along with rich Republicans, keep the doors open to non-European immigration, and thus America has grown “browner” and “shorter.” (That’s Coulter’s description from Adios America). Corruption rises. So does terrorism and rape.Coulter’s ideological interpretation of Trump’s appeal is plausible. It explains, for instance, why support for Trump correlates more strongly to racial resentment than economic misfortune.

Trump may win votes by moderating his stance on immigration. But that’s not how Coulter sells books.

Coulter’s problem is that on the very week she’s unveiled her immigration-themed defense of Trumpism, Trump himself has begun jettisoning it. On Wednesday night, he admitted that it’s “very, very hard” to deport all the undocumented immigrants in the country and implied that he would be open to some people being allowed to stay legally without becoming citizens, provided they pay back taxes. Suddenly, Trump is flirting with an immigration policy that resembles that of every other Republican who ran for president. Which makes Coulter look like a dupe. On Thursday on his show, Rush Limbaugh had a hearty laugh at her expense.

Maybe Coulter, like the other high-profile supporters Trump has burned, will accept her humiliation and resort to defending Trump no matter what he says. Her incentives, however, are different. Unlike most of the folks who appear on television supporting Trump, she has an independent brand. And it’s built on white nationalism. Trump may win votes by moderating his stance on immigration. But that’s not how Coulter sells books.

Coulter also needs an explanation for Trump’s likely defeat, an explanation that will preserve her ability to claim that America’s silent majority believes the things she does. By emphasizing Trump’s immigration flip-flop, Coulter could argue that this issue cost him the white votes he needed to win.

Trumpism—a brand of conservatism defined above all by white racial nostalgia—will survive November’s election. Less clear is whether Trump will remain its champion or become its fall guy. Like many people Trump has done business with, Coulter has learned that trusting Trump is not the wisest of investments.

Coulter has described herself as a polemicist who likes to “stir up the pot,” and does not “pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do,”[4] drawing criticism from the left, and sometimes from the right.[5] Coulter’s syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate appears in newspapers, and is featured on major conservative websites. As of 2016, Coulter has 12 best-selling books, including most recently Adios, America! and In Trump We Trust.

Early life

Coulter as a senior in high school, 1980.

Ann Hart Coulter was born on December 8, 1961, in New York City, to John Vincent Coulter (1926–2008), an FBI agent of Irish–German heritage,[6] who was a native of Albany, New York; and Nell Husbands Coulter (née Martin; 1928–2009), a native of Paducah, Kentucky.[7][8] All eight of her paternal great-great-grandparents were immigrants.[6] Her family later moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Coulter and her two older brothers, James and John, were raised.[9] She was raised in a conservative household in Connecticut by Republican parents, with a father who loved Joseph McCarthy. Coulter says she has identified as a conservative since kindergarten. To prep for arguments, she read books like Barry Goldwater‘s Conscience of a Conservative.[10]

At age 14, Coulter visited her older brother in New York City where he attended law school. While he was in class, he had his little sister read books by Milton Friedman and William E. Simon. When he got home from class, he quizzed Coulter. As a reward, he and his friends took her out to bars on the Upper East Side. Reading Republican books made Coulter dream about working as a writer.[10] She graduated from New Canaan High School in 1980. Coulter’s age was disputed in 2002 while she was arguing that she was not yet 40, yet Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove cited that she provided a birthdate of December 8, 1961, when registering to vote in New Canaan, Connecticut, prior to the 1980 Presidential election. Meanwhile, a driver’s license issued several years later allegedly listed her birthdate as December 8, 1963. Coulter will not confirm either date, citing privacy concerns.[11]

Coulter’s career is highlighted by the publication of twelve books, as well as the weekly syndicated newspaper column that she publishes. She is particularly known for her polemical style,[24] and describes herself as someone who likes to “stir up the pot. I don’t pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do”.[25] She has been compared to Clare Boothe Luce, one of her idols, for her satirical style.[26] She also makes numerous public appearances, speaking on television and radio talk shows, as well as on collegecampuses, receiving both praise and protest. Coulter typically spends 6–12 weeks of the year on speaking engagement tours, and more when she has a book coming out.[27] In 2010, she made an estimated $500,000 on the speaking circuit, giving speeches on topics of modern conservatism, gay marriage, and what she describes as the hypocrisy of modern American liberalism.[28] During one appearance at the University of Arizona, a pie was thrown at her.[29][30][31] Coulter has, on occasion, in defense of her ideas, responded with inflammatory remarks toward hecklers and protestors who attend her speeches.[32][33]

Her second book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, published by Crown Forum in 2002, reached the number one spot on The New York Times non-fiction best seller list.[35] In Slander, Coulter argues that President George W. Bush was given unfair negative media coverage. The factual accuracy of Slander was called into question by then-comedian and author, and now Democratic U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken; he also accused her of citing passages out of context.[36] Others investigated these charges, and also raised questions about the book’s accuracy and presentation of facts.[37][38][39] Coulter responded to criticisms in a column called “Answering My Critics”.[40]

Coulter’s fifth book, published by Crown Forum in 2006, is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.[45] In it, she argues, first, that American liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, and second, that it bears all the attributes of a religion itself.[46]Godless debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.[47] Some passages in the book match portions of others’ writings published at an earlier time (including newspaper articles and a Planned Parenthood document), leading John Barrie of iThenticate to assert that Coulter had engaged in “textbook plagiarism”.[48]

In 1999 Coulter worked as a regular columnist for George magazine.[21][57] Coulter also wrote exclusive weekly columns between 1998 and 2003 and with occasional columns thereafter for the conservative magazine Human Events. In her columns for the magazine, she discusses judicial rulings, Constitutional issues, and legal matters affecting Congress and the executive branch.[58]

In 2001 as a contributing editor and syndicated columnist for National Review Online (NRO), Coulter was asked by editors to make changes to a piece written after the September 11 attacks. On the national television show Politically Incorrect, Coulter accused NRO of censorship and said that she was paid $5 per article. NRO dropped her column and terminated her editorship. Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of NRO, said, “We did not ‘fire’ Ann for what she wrote… we ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty [concerning the editing disagreement].”[59]

Coulter contracted with USA Today to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention. She wrote one article that began, “Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston…” and referred to some unspecified female attendees as “corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons”. The newspaper declined to print the article citing an editing dispute over “basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable”. An explanatory article by the paper went on to say “Coulter told the online edition of Editor & Publisher magazine that ‘USA Today doesn’t like my “tone”, humor, sarcasm, etc., which raises the intriguing question of why they hired me to write for them.'” USA Today replaced Coulter with Jonah Goldberg, and Coulter published it instead on her website.[60][61][62]

In August 2005, the Arizona Daily Star dropped Coulter’s syndicated column, citing reader complaints that “Many readers find her shrill, bombastic, and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives”.[63]

In July 2006, some newspapers replaced Coulter’s column with those of other conservative columnists following the publication of her fourth book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.[64] After The Augusta Chronicle dropped her column, newspaper editor Michael Ryan explained that “it came to the point where she was the issue rather than what she was writing about”.[65] Ryan also stated that “pulling Ann Coulter’s column hurts; she’s one of the clearest thinkers around”.

She has criticized former president George W. Bush‘s immigration proposals, saying they led to “amnesty”. In a 2007 column, she claimed that the current immigration system was set up to deliberately reduce the percentage of whites in the population. In it, she said:[66]

In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.

One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.

Overall, Coulter’s columns are highly critical of liberals and Democrats. In 2006, she wrote:[67]

This year’s Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.

To wit, they’re claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they are all for the war against terror—absolutely in favor of that war—they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as “Iraqi civilians”, even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.

In an interview with Bob McKeown on the edition of January 26, 2005, of The Fifth Estate, Coulter came under criticism for her statement, “Canada used to be… one of our most… most loyal friends, and vice versa. I mean, Canada sent troops to Vietnam. Was Vietnam less containable and more of a threat than Saddam Hussein?” McKeown contradicted her with, “No, actually Canada did not send troops to Vietnam.”[69] On the edition of February 18, 2005 of Washington Journal, Coulter justified her statement by referring to the thousands of Canadians who served in the American armed forces during the Vietnam era, either because they volunteered or because they were living in the United States during the war years and got drafted. She said, “The Canadian Government didn’t send troops … but … they came and fought with the Americans. So I was wrong. It turns out there were 10,000 Americans who happened to be born in Canada.” (There were actually between 5,000 and 20,000 Canadians who fought in Vietnam itself, including approximately 80 who were killed.)[70] John Cloud of Time, writing about the incident a few months later, said, “Canada [sent] noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972″.[68]

Films

Coulter appeared in three films released during 2004. The first was Feeding the Beast, a made-for-television documentary on the “24-Hour News Revolution”.[71] The other two films were FahrenHYPE 9/11, a direct-to-video documentary rebuttal of Michael Moore‘s Fahrenheit 911, and Is It True What They Say About Ann?, a documentary on Coulter containing clips of interviews and speeches.[72] In 2015, Coulter had a cameo as the Vice President in the made-for-TV movie Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!.

Personal life

Coulter has been engaged several times, but she has never married and has no children.[32] She has dated Spin founder and publisher Bob Guccione, Jr.,[21] and conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza.[73] In October 2007, she began dating Andrew Stein, the former president of the New York City Council, a liberal Democrat. When asked about the relationship, Stein told the paper, “She’s attacked a lot of my friends, but what can I say, opposites attract!”[74] On January 7, 2008, however, Stein told the New York Post that the relationship was over, citing irreconcilable differences.[75]Kellyanne Conway, who refers to Coulter as a friend, told New York Magazine in 2017 that Coulter “started dating her security guard probably ten years ago because she couldn’t see anybody else.”[76]

Religious views

Coulter is a Christian and belongs to the Presbyterian denomination.[82][83] Her father was Catholic and her mother was a Protestant.[84] At one public lecture she said, “I don’t care about anything else; Christ died for my sins, and nothing else matters.”[85] She summarized her view of Christianity in a 2004 column, saying, “Jesus’ distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day, because I’m here to redeem you even though you don’t deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it.” She then mocked “the message of Jesus… according to liberals”, summarizing it as “something along the lines of ‘be nice to people,'” which, in turn, she said “is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity.”[86]

Confronting some critics’ views that her content and style of writing is un-Christian-like,[87] Coulter stated that “I’m a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it.”[88]She also said, “Christianity fuels everything I write. Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy—you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism”.[89] In Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Coulter characterized the theory of evolution as bogus science, and contrasted her beliefs to what she called the left’s “obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death”.[90] Coulter subscribes to intelligent design, a theory that rejects evolution.[91]

Coulter was accused of anti-semitism in an October 8, 2007, interview with Donny Deutsch on The Big Idea. During the interview, Coulter stated that the United States is a Christian nation, and said that she wants “Jews to be perfected, as they say” (referring to them being converted to Christianity).[92] Deutsch, a practicing Jew, implied that this was an anti-semitic remark, but Coulter said she didn’t consider it to be a hateful comment.[93][94] In response to Coulter’s comments on the show, the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and Bradley Burston condemned those comments,[95] and the National Jewish Democratic Council asked media outlets to stop inviting Coulter as a guest commentator.[96] Talk show host Dennis Prager, while disagreeing with her comments, said that they were not “anti-semitic”, noting, “There is nothing in what Ann Coulter said to a Jewish interviewer on CNBC that indicates she hates Jews or wishes them ill, or does damage to the Jewish people or the Jewish state. And if none of those criteria is present, how can someone be labeled anti-Semitic?”[97] Conservative activist David Horowitz also defended Coulter against the allegation.[98]

Coulter again sparked outrage in September 2015, when she tweeted in response to multiple Republican candidates’ references to Israel during a Presidential debate, “How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”[99] The Anti-Defamation League referred to the tweets as “ugly, spiteful and anti-Semitic.”[100] In response to accusations of anti-Semitism, she tweeted “I like the Jews, I like fetuses, I like Reagan. Didn’t need to hear applause lines about them all night.”[99]

She also opposes civil unions[112] and privatizing marriage.[113] When addressed with the issue of rights granted by marriage, she said, “Gays already can visit loved ones in hospitals. They can also visit neighbors, random acquaintances, and total strangers in hospitals—just like everyone else. Gays can also pass on property to whomever they would like”.[114] She disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court‘s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, stating there was no right to sodomy written in the Constitution and that under federalism each individual state and territory would have to repeal their sodomy laws. She stated she opposed banning same-sex sexual intercourse.[115] She also stated that same-sex sexual intercourse was already protected under the Fourth Amendment, which prevents police from going into your home without a search warrant or court order.[116]

LGBT conservatism

Since the 1990s, Coulter has had many acquaintances in the LGBT community. She considers herself “the Judy Garland of the Right.” In the last few years, Coulter has attracted many LGBT fans, namely gay men and drag queens.[10][120][121]

At the 2007 CPAC, Coulter said, “I do want to point out one thing that has been driving me crazy with the media—how they keep describing Mitt Romney‘s position as being pro-gays, and that’s going to upset the right wingers,” and “Well, you know, screw you! I’m not anti-gay. We’re against gay marriage. I don’t want gays to be discriminated against.” She added, “I don’t know why all gays aren’t Republican. I think we have the pro-gay positions, which is anti-crime and for tax cuts. Gays make a lot of money and they’re victims of crime. No, they are! They should be with us.”[122]

In Coulter’s 2007 book If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, in the chapter “Gays: No Gay Left Behind!”, she argued that Republican policies were more pro-gay than Democratic policies. Coulter attended the 2010 HomoCon of GOProud, where she commented that same-sex marriage “is not a civil right.”[123] On February 9, 2011, in a column, Coulter described the national Log Cabin Republicans as “ridiculous” and “not conservative at all.” She did however describe the Texas branch of Log Cabin Republicans, for whom she’s been signing books for years, as “comprised of real conservatives.”[124]

At the 2011 CPAC, during her question-and-answer segment, Coulter was asked about GOProud and the controversy over their exclusion from the 2011 CPAC. She boasted how she talked GOProud into dropping its support for same-sex marriage in the party’s platform, saying, “The left is trying to co-opt gays, and I don’t think we should let them. I think they should be on our side,” and “Gays are natural conservatives.”[125] Later that year, Coulter joined advisory board for GOProud. On LogosThe A-List: Dallas she told gay Republican Taylor Garrett that “The gays have got to be pro-life,” and “As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting?”[126] Coulter has referred to Democractic politicians Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Edwards as “fag(got).”[127]

War on Drugs

Coulter spoke about drugs as a guest on Piers Morgan Live, when she said that marijuana users “can’t perform daily functions.”[130]

Political activities and commentary

Ann Coulter has described herself as a “polemicist” who likes to “stir up the pot” and doesn’t “pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do.”[4] While her political activities in the past have included advising a plaintiff suing President Bill Clinton as well as considering a run for Congress, she mostly serves as a political pundit, sometimes creating controversy ranging from rowdy uprisings at some of the colleges where she speaks to protracted discussions in the media. Time magazine’s John Cloud once observed that Coulter “likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote.”[68] This was in reference to her statement that “it would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950—except Goldwater in ’64—the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.”[131] Similarly, in an October 2007 interview with the New York Observer, Coulter said:[132]

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.

It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care—and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’

In addition to questioning whether women’s right to vote is a good thing, Coulter has also appeared on Fox News and advocated for a poll tax and a literacy test for voters (this was in 1999, and she reiterated her support of a literacy test in 2015).[133] This is not a viewpoint widely shared by members of the Republican Party.

Paula Jones – Bill Clinton case

Coulter first became a public figure shortly before becoming an unpaid legal adviser for the attorneys representing Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Coulter’s friend George Conway had been asked to assist Jones’ attorneys, and shortly afterward Coulter, who wrote a column about the Paula Jones case for Human Events, was also asked to help, and she began writing legal briefs for the case.

Coulter later stated that she would come to mistrust the motives of Jones’ head lawyer, Joseph Cammaratta, who by August or September 1997 was advising Jones that her case was weak and to settle, if a favorable settlement could be negotiated.[18][134] From the outset, Jones had sought an apology from Clinton at least as eagerly as she sought a settlement.[135] However, in a later interview Coulter recounted that she herself had believed that the case was strong, that Jones was telling the truth, that Clinton should be held publicly accountable for his misconduct, and that a settlement would give the impression that Jones was merely interested in extorting money from the President.[18]

Coulter played one particularly key role in keeping the Jones case alive. In Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff’s new book Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, Coulter is unmasked as the one who leaked word of Clinton’s “distinguishing characteristic”—his reportedly unusually large penis that Jones said she could recognize and describe—to the news media. Her hope was to foster mistrust between the Clinton and Jones camps and forestall a settlement … I thought if I leaked the distinguishing characteristic it would show bad faith in negotiations. [Clinton lawyer] Bob Bennett would think Jones had leaked it. Cammaratta would know he himself hadn’t leaked it and would get mad at Bennett. It might stall negotiations enough for me to get through to [Jones adviser] Susan Carpenter-McMillan to tell her that I thought settling would hurt Paula, that this would ruin her reputation, and that there were other lawyers working for her. Then 36 hours later, she returned my phone call. I just wanted to help Paula. I really think Paula Jones is a hero. I don’t think I could have taken the abuse she came under. She’s this poor little country girl and she has the most powerful man she’s ever met hitting on her sexually, then denying it and smearing her as president. And she never did anything tacky. It’s not like she was going on TV or trying to make a buck out of it.”[18]

In his book, Isikoff also reported Coulter as saying: “We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the President.”[134] After the book came out, Coulter clarified her stated motives, saying:

The only motive for leaking the distinguishing characteristic item that [Isikoff] gives in his book is my self-parodying remark that “it would humiliate the president” and that a settlement would foil our efforts to bring down the president … I suppose you could take the position, as [Isikoff] does, that we were working for Jones because we thought Clinton was a lecherous, lying scumbag, but this argument gets a bit circular. You could also say that Juanita Broaddrick’s secret motive in accusing Clinton of rape is that she hates Clinton because he raped her. The whole reason we didn’t much like Clinton was that we could see he was the sort of man who would haul a low-level government employee like Paula to his hotel room, drop his pants, and say, “Kiss it.” You know: Everything his defense said about him at the impeachment trial. It’s not like we secretly disliked Clinton because of his administration’s position on California’s citrus cartels or something, and then set to work on some crazy scheme to destroy him using a pathological intern as our Mata Hari.[136]

The case went to court after Jones broke with Coulter and her original legal team, and it was dismissed via summary judgment. The judge ruled that even if her allegations proved true, Jones did not show that she had suffered any damages, stating, “… plaintiff has not demonstrated any tangible job detriment or adverse employment action for her refusal to submit to the governor’s alleged advances. The president is therefore entitled to summary judgment on plaintiff’s claim of quid pro quo sexual harassment.” The ruling was appealed by Jones’ lawyers. During the pendency of the appeal, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000 ($151,000 after legal fees) in November 1998, in exchange for Jones’ dismissal of the appeal. By then, the Jones lawsuit had given way to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

In October 2000, Jones revealed that she would pose for nude pictures in an adult magazine, saying she wanted to use the money to pay taxes and support her grade-school-aged children, in particular saying, “I’m wanting to put them through college and maybe set up a college fund.”[137] Coulter publicly denounced Jones, calling her “the trailer-park trash they said she was” (Coulter had earlier chastened Clinton supporters for calling Jones this name),[138] after Clinton’s former campaign strategist James Carville had made the widely reported remark, “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, and you’ll never know what you’ll find,” and called Jones a “fraud, at least to the extent of pretending to be an honorable and moral person.”[137]

Coulter wrote:

Paula surely was given more than a million dollars in free legal assistance from an array of legal talent she will never again encounter in her life, much less have busily working on her behalf. Some of those lawyers never asked for or received a dime for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work performed at great professional, financial and personal cost to themselves. Others got partial payments out of the settlement. But at least they got her reputation back. And now she’s thrown it away.[139]

Jones claimed not to have been offered any help with a book deal of her own or any other additional financial help after the lawsuit.[137]

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m… so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards, so I think I’ll just conclude here and take your questions.

The comment was in reference to Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington‘s use of the epithet and his subsequent mandatory “psychological assessment” imposed by ABC executives.[142] It was widely interpreted as meaning that Coulter had called Edwards a “faggot,” but Coulter argued that she did not actually do so, while simultaneously indicating she would not have been wrong to say it.[143] Edwards responded on his web site by characterizing Coulter’s words as “un-American and indefensible,” and asking readers to help him “raise $100,000 in ‘Coulter Cash’ this week to keep this campaign charging ahead and fight back against the politics of bigotry.”[144] He also called her a “she-devil,” adding, “I should not have name-called. But the truth is—forget the names—people like Ann Coulter, they engage in hateful language.”[145] Coulter’s words also drew condemnation from many prominent Republicans and Democrats, as well as groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).[144][146][147] Three advertisers (Verizon, Sallie Mae and Netbank) also pulled their advertisements from Coulter’s web site,[148] and several newspapers dropped her column.[149][150] Coulter responded in an e-mail to the New York Times, “C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.”[147] On March 5, 2007, she appeared on Hannity and Colmes and said, “Faggot isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays. It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss.'”[151] Gay rights advocates were not convinced. “Ann Coulter’s use of this anti-gay slur is vile and unacceptable,” said Neil G. Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, “and the applause from her audience is an important reminder that Coulter’s ugly brand of bigotry is at the root of the discriminatory policies being promoted at this gathering.”[141] A spokesman for Sen. John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, called Coulter’s comments “wildly inappropriate.”[141]

As the campaign waged on, she continued to insert her commentary regarding the candidates, both Democrats and Republicans. In a June 2007 interview, Coulter named Duncan Hunter as her choice for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination, highlighting his views on immigration and specifically his anti-abortion credentials, saying “[t]his is a winning issue for us, protecting little babies.”[152] On January 16, 2008, Coulter began endorsing Governor Mitt Romney as her choice for the 2008 Republican nomination, saying he is “manifestly the best candidate” (contrasting Romney with Republican candidates John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani).[153] By contrast, Coulter was critical of eventual Republican nominee John McCain. On the January 31, 2008, broadcast of Hannity and Colmes, Coulter claimed that if McCain won the Republican nomination for president, she would support and campaign for Hillary Clinton, stating, “[Clinton] is more conservative than McCain.”[154]

Regarding then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama in an April 2, 2008, column, she characterized his book Dreams from My Father as a “dimestore Mein Kampf.” Coulter writes, “He says the reason black people keep to themselves is that it’s ‘easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.’ Here’s a little inside scoop about white people: We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.”[155]

On the eve of Coulter’s first speech at the University of Western Ontario, an e-mail to Coulter from François Houle, provost of the University of Ottawa, was leaked to the media. The e-mail warned that “promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.” Coulter released a public statement alleging that by sending her the e-mail, Houle was promoting hatred against conservatives.[157] During her speech at the University of Western Ontario, she told a Muslim student to “take a camel,” in response to the student’s question about previous comments by Coulter that Muslims should not be allowed on airplanes.[158]

On March 22, the University of Ottawa made international news when liberal protesters conspired to prevent Coulter from speaking. The event was canceled in spite of a massive security presence; Alain Boucher of the Ottawa Police Service said there were ten officers visible at the scene, “plus other resources” nearby.[159] Boucher alleged that Coulter’s security team decided to call off the event, saying, “We gave her options,” including, he said, to “find a bigger venue.” But “they opted to cancel … It’s not up to the Ottawa police to make that decision.”[160] Boucher claimed there were no arrests.[161] CTV News reported, “It was a disaster in terms of just organization, which is probably one of the reasons why it was cancelled,” citing the small number of students tasked with confirming who had signed up to attend Coulter’s talk.[162]

Event organizer and conservative activist Ezra Levant blamed the protest on the letter sent to Coulter by Houle.[163] After the cancellation, Coulter called the University of Ottawa “bush league,” stating:[164]

I go to the best schools, Harvard, the Ivy League, and those kids are too intellectually proud to threaten speakers … I would like to know when this sort of violence, this sort of protest, has been inflicted upon a Muslim—who appear to be, from what I’ve read of the human rights complaints, the only protected group in Canada. I think I’ll give my speech tomorrow night in a burka. That will protect me.

Comments on Islam, Arabs, and terrorism

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.[165]

This comment resulted in Coulter’s being fired as a columnist by the National Review, which she subsequently referred to as “squeamish girly-boys.”[166] Responding to this comment, Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations remarked in The Chicago Sun Times that before September 11, Coulter “would have faced swift repudiation from her colleagues,” but “now it’s accepted as legitimate commentary.”[167]

I began running Coulter columns on Frontpagemag.com shortly after she came up with her most infamous line, which urged America to put jihadists to the sword and convert them to Christianity. Liberals were horrified; I was not. I thought to myself, this is a perfect send-up of what our Islamo-fascist enemies believe—that as infidels we should be put to the sword and converted to Islam. I regarded Coulter’s phillipic (sic) as a Swiftian commentary on liberal illusions of multi-cultural outreach to people who want to rip out our hearts.[168]

One day after the attacks (when death toll estimates were higher than later), Coulter asserted that only Muslims could have been behind the attacks:

Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims—at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours.[169]

If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.[171]

Coulter also cited the 2002 Senate testimony of FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who was acclaimed for condemning her superiors for refusing to authorize a search warrant for 9-11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui when he refused to consent to a search of his computer. They knew that he was a Muslim in flight school who had overstayed his visa, and the French Intelligence Service had confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups. Coulter said she agreed that probable cause existed in the case, but that refusing consent, being in flight school and overstaying a visa should not constitute grounds for a search. Citing a poll which found that 98 percent of Muslims between the ages of 20 and 45 said they would not fight for Britain in the war in Afghanistan, and that 48 percent said they would fight for Osama bin Laden she asserted “any Muslim who has attended a mosque in Europe—certainly in England, where Moussaoui lived—has had ‘affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups,'” so that she parsed Rowley’s position as meaning that “‘probable cause’ existed to search Moussaoui’s computer because he was a Muslim who had lived in England.” Coulter says the poll was “by the “Daily Telegraph“, actually it was by Sunrise, an “Asian” (i.e., Indian subcontinent-oriented) radio station, canvassing the opinions of 500 Muslims in Greater London (not Britain as a whole), mainly of Pakistani origin and aged between 20 and 45. Because “FBI headquarters … refused to engage in racial profiling,” they failed to uncover the 9-11 plot, Coulter asserted. “The FBI allowed thousands of Americans to be slaughtered on the altar of political correctness. What more do liberals want?”[172][173]

Coulter wrote in another column that she had reviewed the civil rights lawsuits against certain airlines to determine which of them had subjected Arabs to the most “egregious discrimination” so that she could fly only that airline. She also said that the airline should be bragging instead of denying any of the charges of discrimination brought against them.[174] In an interview with The Guardian she said, “I think airlines ought to start advertising: ‘We have the most civil rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.'” When the interviewer replied by asking what Muslims would do for travel, she responded, “They could use flying carpets.”[131]

One comment that drew criticism from the blogosphere, as well as fellow conservatives,[175] was made during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2006, where she said, referring to the prospect of a nuclear-equipped Iran, “What if they start having one of these bipolar episodes with nuclear weapons? I think our motto should be, post-9-11: Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.”[176] Coulter had previously written a nearly identical passage in her syndicated column: “… I believe our motto should be, after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that’s offensive. How about ‘camel jockey‘? What? Now what’d I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?”[177]

In October 2007, Coulter made further controversial remarks regarding Arabs—in this case Iraqis—when she stated in an interview with The New York Observer:

We’ve killed about 20,000 of them, of terrorists, of militants, of Al Qaeda members, and they’ve gotten a little over 3,000 of ours. That is where the war is being fought, in Iraq. That is where we are fighting Al Qaeda. Sorry we have to use your country, Iraqis, but you let Saddam come to power, and we are going to instill democracy in your country.[178]

In a May 2007 article looking back at the life of recently deceased evangelical Reverend Jerry Falwell, Coulter commented on his (later retracted) statement after the 9/11 attacks that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America … helped this happen.” In her article, Coulter stated that she disagreed with Falwell’s statement, “because Falwell neglected to specifically include Teddy Kennedy and ‘the Reverend’ Barry Lynn.”[179]

In October 2007, Coulter participated in David Horowitz‘ “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” remarking in a speech at the University of Southern California, “The fact of Islamo-Fascism is indisputable. I find it tedious to detail the savagery of the enemy … I want to kill them. Why don’t Democrats?”[180]

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Coulter told Hannity host Sean Hannity that the wife of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev should be jailed for wearing a hijab. Coulter continued by saying “Assimilating immigrants into our culture isn’t really working. They’re assimilating us into their culture.”[181]

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, Coulter said France “needs to move to the next step” in dealing with terror. Coulter said of some immigrants:

They don’t want to live in Muslim countries, and yet they want to change the non-Muslim countries they move to [into] Muslim countries. It may be a small minority of Muslims “and still it’s enough of them that maybe you take a little pause in Muslim immigration for a while.”[182]

Coulter has attributed American gun violence in America to black and Muslim American men, stating that the epidemic of gun-related deaths is “not a gun problem, it’s a demographic problem.”[183]

When asked about the financial crisis in the 2000s, Coulter claimed one reason for it was that “they gave your mortgage to a less qualified minority.”[184]

Ionizing radiation as “cancer vaccine”

On March 16, 2011, discussing the Fukushima I nuclear accidents, Coulter, citing research into radiation hormesis, wrote that there was “burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.”[185] Her comments were criticized by figures across the political spectrum, from Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly (who told Coulter, “You have to be responsible … in something like this, you gotta get the folks out of there, and you have to report worst-case scenarios”)[186] to MSNBC‘s Ed Schulz (who stated that “You would laugh at her if she wasn’t making light of a terrible tragedy.”)[187]

2012 presidential election

During the Republican Party presidential primaries, she supported Mitt Romney over former Speaker of the HouseNewt Gingrich. On an interview during The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, she compared Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the media to Jesse Jackson “accusing people of racism.”[188] On her website, she posted a column titled, “Re-elect Obama: Vote Newt!” arguing that if Newt Gingrich won the Republican nomination, Barack Obama would win re-election.[189] When asked to respond about her criticism, Newt Gingrich dismissed them as “the old order” and cited recent polls showing him ahead of Mitt Romney.[190]

On October 22, 2012, following a presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Coulter published the following tweet from her official Twitter account: “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard,” drawing stiff criticism for her use of a word which some find offensive to describe the president of the United States. The Special Olympics condemned Coulter in a tweet shortly after Coulter’s.[191] On The Alan Colmes Show, Coulter stated that she does not regret her use of the word, saying, “‘Retard’ had been used colloquially to just mean ‘loser’ for 30 years. But no, these aggressive victims have to come out and tell you what words to use.”[192]

After the election, in which Barack Obama won, Ann Coulter wrote a column titled “Romney Was Not the Problem”. In it she argued against the idea that Mitt Romney lost because he failed to get his message across. She also said that Mitt Romney lost because he was running against an incumbent.[193]

2013 CPAC Conference

In March 2013, Coulter was one of the keynote speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where she made references to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie‘s weight (“CPAC had to cut back on its speakers this year about 300 pounds”) and progressive activist Sandra Fluke‘s hairdo. (Coulter quipped that Fluke didn’t need birth control pills because “that haircut is birth control enough.”) Coulter advocated against a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants because such new citizens would never vote for Republican candidates: “If amnesty goes through, America becomes California and no Republican will ever win another election.”[194][195]

2016 presidential election

In the summer of 2015, Coulter appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and predicted of all of the Republicans that have announced their candidacy for the presidency, that Donald Trump had the best chance of winning the general election, she was laughed at by the studio audience.[196] Coulter later endorsed Donald Trump in the general election.[197]

Berkeley cancellation

In April 2017, The New York Times reported that the University of California, Berkeley had cancelled Ann Coulter’s speech scheduled for April 27.[205] A university spokesman said they had not discussed a specific date with her and only learned about it by reading news reports.[206] The university administrators cited threats of violence and offered to accommodate her on a later date. Coulter said she saw no way forward, telling The New York Times, “It’s a sad day for free speech.”[207] Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren publicly called for the university to defend her right to free speech.[207]

Plagiarism accusations

In October 2001, Coulter was accused of plagiarism in her 1998 book High Crimes and Misdemeanors by Michael Chapman, a columnist for the journal Human Events who claims that passages were taken from a supplement he wrote for the journal in 1997 titled “A Case for Impeachment.”[166]

On the July 5, 2016, episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, guest John Barrie, the CEO of iParadigms, offers his professional opinion that Coulter plagiarized in her book Godless as well as in many columns over the past year.[208] Barrie ran “Godless” through iThenticate, his company’s machine which is able to scan works and compare them to existing texts. He points to a 25 word section of the text that exactly matches a Planned Parenthood pamphlet and a 33 word section almost duplicating a 1999 article from the Portland Press as some examples of evidence.

Media Matters for America has appealed to Random House publishing to further investigate Coulter’s work.[209] The syndicator of her columns cleared her of the plagiarism charges.[210] Universal Press Syndicate and Crown Books also defended Coulter against the charges.[211]

Columnist Bill Nemitz from the Portland Press Herald accused Coulter of plagiarizing a very specific sentence from his newspaper in her book Godless, but he also acknowledged that one sentence is insufficient grounds for filing suit.[212]

Public perception

General

Sometimes referred to as an “internet queen,”[213] Coulter’s has a high public profile. [214]

Gendered criticism

Known for rejecting “the academic convention of euphemism and circumlocution,”[215] Coulter has been subject to a fair amount of criticism from scholars. Feminist critics have criticized the way that Coulter functions as a thin, blonde, heterosexual woman in the Republican party who prefers mini skirts and heels over a business suit. The argument here is that Coulter plays to misogyny in order to further her goals; she “dominates without threatening (at least not straight men).”[216] These critics also reject Coulter’s opinion that the gains made by women have as far as to create an anti-male society[217] and her call for women to be rejected from the military because they are more vicious than men.[218] Like the famous anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, Coulter uses traditionally masculine rhetoric as reasoning for the need for traditional gender roles, and she carries this idea of feminized dependency into her governmental policies, according to feminist critics.[219]

2016 Comedy Central Roast

In September 2016, Coulter was invited to participate in a roast of Rob Lowe on Comedy Central, as Coulter is often considered a successful satirist.[220] There is speculation that Coulter attended with the primary goal of promoting her newest book at the time, In Trump We Trust, but she ended up becoming the main target of the vitriol, and the roast subsequently went viral. Coulter herself refers to the roast as the “Ann Coulter Roast with Rob Lowe.”[221]

As bonds break a three day win streak and the U.S market hitting new record highs with a trifecta of records, CNBC was roaring about what to expect going forward. The Daily Reckoning contributor David Stockman joined Courtney Reagan to discuss what to expect going forward.

After the CNBC host positioned the critiques offered by David Stockman of the Trump administration she asked whether that would continue given the state of the market. Stockman did not mix words beginning the conversation with, “What’s going on today is complete insanity. The market is apparently pricing in a huge Trump stimulus package, when if you just look at the real world out there the only thing that is going to happen is a fiscal bloodbath and a White House train wreck like never before in U.S history.

How much more evidence do these so called traders need? Trump is lost in Twitter-land and he is out of control. He is turning out to be a complete jackass in the Oval Office. Co-President Bannon is off the deep end on terrorism, travel bans, Mexican walls, immigrant bashing and protectionism.”

David Stockman is a former Reagan Administration official who was the Office of Management and Budget Director. He also served as a two-term Congressman from the great state of Michigan. His latest book, Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back is out now. It offers his insight and exclusive analysis on exactly what the newly elected president must do in order to succeed in the White House. To get your own FREE copy, CLICK HERE to learn how.

“[They are] having nothing to do with the economic agenda and Trump has got an empty economic bench. He’s got no Secretary of the Treasury, no Office of Management and Budget, no Council of Economic Advisor Chairman. By this time, when I was there with the Reagan Administration, the plan was ready to go and he was going to Congress within a couple of days into February. We have a debt ceiling freight train coming down the road which will hit March 15 and then the cash will start running out and the system will be on edge. All of the continuing resolutions expire in April.”

“They are going to spend the year trying to repeal and replace Obamacare and it will be a fiasco. Nothing is going to happen this year. I don’t even think they can pass the budget resolution. There is going to be no tax action this year. If there is any bill next year it is going to be deficit neutral. Which means it is not going to add $15 to earnings like these crazy people expect.”

“Why would you be trading in this market, with this kind of chaos emerging everywhere at twenty six times trailing earnings? That’s where we are. It is completely crazy and it is only a question of how many more days or weeks that this kind of fantasy land can last.”

Courtney Reagan then pressed back asking, “At what point do you give in and admit that [Trump] is atypical but maybe he could get things done? I mean, look at all of the CEO’s that Trump has met with.” The former Reagan insider remarked that, “CEO’s come and go with every president. They came in with Reagan, they tell a president what they want to hear. These guys are just selling the song and dance about how many jobs they’re going to create in the next five years. They have no clue.”

“If we have a recession in the next five years, which surely we will, because recessions have not been outlawed and we haven’t had one for ten years. None of this stuff is going to happen. This is meaningless. What is meaningful is that Trump is out of control. This tweeting and getting off track on all of this terrorism stuff. This is a sign that there is going to be no governing coalition and that all of this fiscal stimulus expected by Wall Street is a complete fantasy. It can’t happen.”

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When CNBC then turned over the camera to a day trader who asked about the positive sentiment that exists within the market regarding Trump and his plan to deregulate Stockman stayed true to message. “Trump is just putting out press releases and the guise of Executive Orders. All of this stuff is going to get litigated, it goes through a rulemaking process, that takes years. So the relief on regulation will be important, but it way down the road and it won’t be that impactful.”

“The second thing, is we’re at 92 months in this expansion already. It is running out of gas. You can’t expect it to run forever. That is seemingly what is priced in by the market.”

“The third thing is, we have a giant debt and deficit problem. The debt ceiling is coming back into play it will be 20 trillion when it freezes in on March 15th. I’ll tell you this, people aren’t paying attention to the fact that Trump will never get a debt ceiling increase through the Congress without a government shutdown. When that happens it is, “bar the doors” because nobody is expecting it. We need to look at the facts, not the hopes.”

As the CNBC affirmed, it is not clear that the market is just going to drop tomorrow and history will repeat itself, Stockman repositioned. “The market it clearly factoring in a big Trump stimulus and I think anybody down there would admit if it doesn’t happen, if we get zero tax cuts, if we get a fiscal bloodbath in the Washington I am describing – the market is not going to stay where it is today at these absurd multiples of earnings.”

“This is all based on the idea that there is going to be a surge of economic growth and that profits are going to come back from about $89 a share by basis, where they were during the last twelve months, to a potential $110 or $130. My argument is there is not going to be any economic rebound. There is not going to be any profit surge. Therefore the market will be repricing dramatically downward once it is clear.”

Another CNBC analysis asked why – with the positive trends in jobless claims, manufacturing increasing, interest rates at near record lows – would the market not close out the year near record levels? “The market is assuming that profits are going to rebound. That we are not going to have any market dislocation and that nobody is going to be pushing back on Trump. It is hard to understand how people watching the day-to-day action down there could believe that.”

“Everybody is pushing back on Trump, he can’t even get his cabinet approved. He’s going to be bogged down in a Supreme Court fight, he’s going to be bogged down in a fight over a ridiculous travel ban. The idea that there is not going to be pushback is naive. What there is going to be is a train wreck. It is already clear that the people in the White House have no idea what they’re doing and it is only a matter of time before this honeymoon goodwill evaporates and the politicians get down to doing what they do best. Which is to undermine and obstruct anything that might be positive.”

When finally asked whether there is anything positive that would make him turn bullish in the near future he responded affirmably, “No, because Trump is inheriting thirty years of a disaster created by his predecessors. We have to take this $20 trillion of debt seriously. There is $10 trillion more built in under current policy, and that is without a dime of Trump tax cuts, infrastructure or stimulus. There is going to be a tremendous fiscal crisis in the years ahead which will prevent any of the kind of action that the “stimulus junkies” are looking for.

Office of Management and Budget

Stockman was one of the most controversial OMB directors ever appointed, also known as the “Father of Reaganomics.” He resigned in August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, he assisted in the passing of the “Reagan Budget” (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped would curtail the “welfare state“. He thus gained a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O’Neill‘s Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker‘s Republican-controlled Senate. During this period, Stockman became well known to the public during the contentious political wrangling concerning the role of the federal government in American society.

Stockman’s influence within the Reagan Administration was weakened after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the infamous 18,246 word article, “The Education of David Stockman”,[7] in its December 1981 issue, based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider.

Stockman was quoted as referring to Reagan’s tax act in these terms: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate…. It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”[7] Of the budget process during his first year on the job, Stockman was quoted as saying, “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” which was used as the subtitle of the article.[7]

After “being taken to the woodshed by the president” because of his candor with Greider, Stockman became concerned with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt. On 1 August 1985, he resigned from OMB and later wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed in which he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to endorse a reduction of government spending to offset large tax decreases to avoid the creation of large deficits and an increasing national debt.

Fiscal legacy

President Jimmy Carter’s last fiscal year budget ended with a $79.0 billion budget deficit (and a national debt of $907,701,000,000 [8] as of September 30, 1980), ending during the period of David Stockman’s and Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, on October 1, 1981.[9] The gross federal national debt had just increased to $1.0 trillion during October 1981 ($998 billion on 30 September 1981, up from $907.7 billion during the last full fiscal year of the Carter administration[8]).

By 30 September 1985, four and a half years into the Reagan administration and shortly after Stockman’s resignation from the OMB during August 1985, the gross federal debt was $1.8 trillion.[8] Stockman’s OMB work within the administration during 1981 until August 1985 was dedicated to negotiating with the Senate and House about the next fiscal year’s budget, executed later during the autumn of 1985, which resulted in the national debt becoming $2.1 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1986.[8] Reaganomics had just begun.

In 1981, Stockman received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.[10]

Business career

After leaving government, Stockman joined the Wall St. investment bank Salomon Brothers and later became a partner of the New York–based private equity company, the Blackstone Group.[11]:125–127 His record was mixed at Blackstone, with some very good investments, such as American Axle, but also failures, including Haynes International and Republic Technologies.[11]:144–147 During 1999, after Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman curtailed Stockman’s role in managing the investments he had developed,[11]:146 Stockman resigned from Blackstone to start his own private equity fund company, Heartland Industrial Partners, L.P., based in Greenwich, Connecticut.[12]

On the strength of his investment record at Blackstone, Stockman and his partners raised $1.3 billion of equity from institutional and other investors. With Stockman’s guidance, Heartland used a contrarian investment strategy, buying controlling interests in companies operating in sectors of the U.S. economy that were attracting the least amount of new equity: auto parts and textiles. With the help of about $9 billion in Wall Street debt financing, Heartland completed more than 20 transactions in less than 2 years to create four portfolio companies: Springs Industries, Metaldyne, Collins & Aikman, and TriMas. Several major investments performed very poorly, however. Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy during 2005 and when Heartland sold Metaldyne to Asahi Tec Corp. during 2006, Heartland lost most of the $340 million of equity it had invested in the business.[13]

Collins & Aikman Corp.

During August 2003, Stockman became CEO of Collins & Aikman Corporation, a Detroit-based manufacturer of automotive interior components. He was ousted from that job days before Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 on May 17, 2005.

Criminal and civil charges

On March 26, 2007, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted Stockman in “a scheme… to defraud [Collins & Aikman]’s investors, banks and creditors by manipulating C&A’s reported revenues and earnings.” The United States Securities and Exchange Commission also brought civil charges against Stockman related to actions that he performed while CEO of Collins & Aikman.[14] Stockman suffered a personal financial loss, over $13 million, along with losses suffered by as many as 15,000 Collins & Aikman employees worldwide.

Stockman said in a statement posted on his law firm’s website that the company’s end was the consequence of an industry decline, not due to fraud.[15] On January 9, 2009, the US Attorney’s Office announced that it did not intend to prosecute Stockman for this case.[16]

Web site

In March 2014 Stockman launched a web based daily periodical, David Stockman’s Contra Corner featuring both his own articles and those from leading contrarian thinkers on geopolitics, economics, and finance.

Quotes

This page is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process. If the page can be expanded into an encyclopedic article, rather than a list of quotations, please do so and remove this message.

“[Social Security] has to be means-tested. And Medicare needs to be means-tested […] Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Let the capital gains go back to the same rate as ordinary income.”[20]

“The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility. They’re on an anti-tax jihad — one that benefits the prosperous classes.”[21]

“Ninety-two percent of the wealth is owned by five percent of the people.” (Bloomberg TV 2013)

“[T]he Republican Party was hijacked by modern imperialists during the Reagan era. As a consequence, the conservative party cannot perform its natural function as watchdog of the public purse because it is constantly seeking legislative action to provision a vast war machine of invasion and occupation.” [23]

^ Jump up to:ab“Collins & Aikman seeks to emerge from bankruptcy,” Bloomberg News article by Jeff Bennett, published in the newspaper The Advocate of Stamford and (identical version, perhaps with changes by the local editor in the common business section for both newspapers) in the Greenwich Time on September 5, 2006, page A7, The Advocate

Career

Attkisson began her broadcast journalism career in 1982, aged 22, as a reporter at WUFT-TV, the PBS station in Gainesville, Florida. She later worked as an anchor and reporter at WTVX-TV Fort Pierce/West Palm Beach, Florida from 1982–1985, WBNS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Columbus, Ohio from 1985–86, and WTVT Tampa, Florida (1986–1990).[7]

1990s

From 1990–1993, Attkisson was an anchor for CNN, and also served as a key anchor for CBS space exploration coverage in 1993.[8] Attkisson left CNN in 1993,[9] moving to CBS, where she anchored the television news broadcast CBS News Up to the Minute and became an investigative correspondent based in Washington, D.C.[7]

She served on the University of Florida‘s Journalism College Advisory Board (1993–1997) and was its chair in 1996.[7] The University gave her an Outstanding Achievement Award in 1997. From 1997 to 2003, Attkisson simultaneously hosted CBS News Up to the Minute and the PBS health-news magazine HealthWeek.[10]

In 2002, she co-authored a college textbook, Writing Right for Broadcast and Internet News; later that same year she won an Emmy Award for her Investigative Journalism about the American Red Cross.[7] The award was presented in New York City on September 10, 2002.[13] Attkisson was part of the CBS News team that received RTNDA-Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2005 for Overall Excellence.[11]

In 2006, Attkisson served as Capitol Hill correspondent for CBS,[14] as one of a small number of female anchors covering the 2006 midterms.[15] Attkisson was part of the CBS News team that received RTNDA-Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2008 for Overall Excellence.[11]

In 2008, Attkisson reported that a claim by Hillary Clinton to have dodged sniper fire in Bosnia was unfounded: Clinton’s trip to Bosnia was risky, Attkisson said, but no real bullets were dodged. Attkisson was on the trip with Clinton.[16] The day after Attkisson’s report on the CBS Evening News, Clinton admitted there was no sniper fire and said she “misspoke.” [17][18]In 2009, Attkisson won an Investigative Emmy Award for Business and Financial Reporting for her exclusive reports on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the bank bailout.[11] The award was presented on December 7 at Fordham University‘s Lincoln Center Campus in New York City.[19]

Attkisson returned to the University of Florida as a keynote speaker at the College of Journalism and Communications in 2010.[6] That same year, she received an Emmy Award nomination for her investigations into members of Congress, and she also received a 2010 Emmy Award nomination for her investigation into waste of tax dollars.[20] In July 2011, Attkisson was nominated for an Emmy Award for her Follow the Money investigations into Congressional travel to the Copenhagen climate summit, and problems with aid to Haiti earthquake victims.[11][21]

In 2011, Paul Offit criticized Attkisson’s reporting on vaccines in his book Deadly Choices as “damning by association” and lacking sufficient evidence.[22] Dr. Offit has been criticized for providing false information about Attkisson and his vaccine industry ties. [23] Attkisson has been identified in the medical literature as using problematic rhetorical tactics that “imply that because there is no conclusive answer to certain problems, vaccines remain a plausible culprit.”[24] Attkisson’s reporting was cited favorably in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine by neurosurgeon Jon Poling who wrote that Offit had “misrepresented” the case of Hannah Poling v. HHS, and that Offit’s remarks on the case were “not evidence based.”[25]

In June 2012, Attkisson’s investigative reporting for the Gunwalker story also won the CBS Evening News the Radio and Television News Directors Association’s National Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video Investigative Reporting. The award was presented October 8, 2012 in New York City.[27] In July 2012, Attkisson’s Gunwalker: Fast and Furious reporting received an Emmy Award[28]

On March 10, 2014, Attkisson resigned from CBS News.[29] She stated that the parting was “amicable”.[30]Politico reported that according to sources within CBS there had been tensions leading to “months of hard-fought negotiations” – that Attkisson had been frustrated over what she perceived to be the network’s liberal bias and lack of dedication to investigative reporting, as well as issues she had with the network’s corporate partners, while some[who?] within the network saw her reporting as agenda-driven and doubted her impartiality.[30]

Later that year came the release of her New York Times Best Seller, Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington (Harpers),[4] in which she accused CBS of protecting the Obama administration by not giving enough coverage to such stories as the 2012 Benghazi attack and slow initial enrollments under Obamacare.[31]

In February 2015, Attkisson gave a TEDx talk at the University of Nevada. In the talk, she said that astroturfing was swaying public opinion, legislation and media outlets.[32]

In May 2013, while still employed at CBS, Attkisson alleged that her personal and work computers had been “compromised” for more than two years.[33]CBS News stated that it had investigated her work computer and found evidence of multiple unauthorized accesses by a third party in late 2012.[34] The U.S. Department of Justice denied any involvement.[35] In her 2014 book, she alleged that her personal computer was hacked with keystroke logging spyware, enabling an intruder to read all her e-mail messages and gain access to the passwords for her financial accounts.[36]

In late January 2015, Attkisson appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee[37] during a confirmation hearing for Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s nominee to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder. Attkisson’s testimony concentrated on the Justice Department under Holder and was not related to Lynch’s qualifications.[by whom?] As part of her appearance in front of that committee, a report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) was released[38] stating that “their investigation was not able to substantiate… allegations that Attkisson’s computers were subject to remote intrusions by the FBI, other government personnel, or otherwise” and the deletion seen in Attkinsson’s video “appeared to be caused by the backspace key being stuck, rather than a remote intrusion”.[39][40][41] “CBS News told the OIG that they did not conduct any analysis on her personal computer.”[42]

In February 2015, The Washington Examiner clarified that the OIG did not examine Attkisson’s compromised CBS News computer,[42] the OIG only inspected Attkisson’s personal devices.[43]

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’

NSA paying US Companies hundreds of millions of dollars for access to data

Does the NSA Record Phone Calls? Glenn Greenwald on Warrentless Domestic Surveillance (2007)

Published on Jul 8, 2013

The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy (AKA “Warrantless Wiretapping”) concerns surveillance of persons within the United States during the collection of foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror. Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the “terrorist surveillance program”, part of the broader President’s Surveillance Program, the NSA was authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, the phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S. Critics, however, claimed that it was in an effort to attempt to silence critics of the Bush Administration and their handling of several hot button issues during its tenure. Under public pressure, the Bush administration ceased the warrantless wiretapping program in January 2007 and returned review of surveillance to the FISA court. Subsequently, in 2008 Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which relaxed some of the original FISA court requirements.

During the Obama Administration, the NSA has officially continued operating under the new FISA guidelines. However, in April 2009 officials at the United States Department of Justice acknowledged that the NSA had engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications in excess of the FISA court’s authority, but claimed that the acts were unintentional and had since been rectified.

All wiretapping of American citizens by the National Security Agency requires a warrant from a three-judge court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. After the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the President broad powers to fight a war against terrorism. The George W. Bush administration used these powers to bypass the FISA court and directed the NSA to spy directly on al Qaeda in a new NSA electronic surveillance program. Reports at the time indicate that an “apparently accidental” “glitch” resulted in the interception of communications that were purely domestic in nature.[5] This action was challenged by a number of groups, including Congress, as unconstitutional.

The exact scope of the program is not known, but the NSA is or was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications going between some of the nation’s largest telecommunication companies’ major interconnected locations, including phone conversations, email, web browsing, and corporate private network traffic.[6] Critics said that such “domestic” intercepts required FISC authorization under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[7] The Bush administration maintained that the authorized intercepts are not domestic but rather foreign intelligence integral to the conduct of war and that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).[8] FISA makes it illegal to intentionally engage in electronic surveillance under appearance of an official act or to disclose or use information obtained by electronic surveillance under appearance of an official act knowing that it was not authorized by statute; this is punishable with a fine of up to $10,000 or up to five years in prison, or both.[9] In addition, the Wiretap Act prohibits any person from illegally intercepting, disclosing, using or divulging phone calls or electronic communications; this is punishable with a fine or up to five years in prison, or both.[10]

After an article about the program, (which had been code-named Stellar Wind), was published in The New York Times on December 16, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed its existence.[11][12][13] The Times had posted the exclusive story on their website the night before, after learning that the Bush administration was considering seeking a Pentagon-Papers-style court injunction to block its publication.[14] Critics of The Times have alleged that executive editor Bill Keller had withheld the story from publication since before the 2004 Presidential election, and that the story that was ultimately published by The Times was essentially the same as reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau had submitted in 2004.[15] In a December 2008 interview with Newsweek, former Justice Department employee Thomas Tamm revealed himself to be the initial whistle-blower to The Times. The FBI began investigating leaks about the program in 2005, with 25 agents and 5 prosecutors on the case.

NSA surveillance has been a matter of political controversy on several occasions, such as its spying on anti-Vietnam-war leaders or economic espionage. In 2013, the extent of some of the NSA’s secret surveillance programs was revealed to the public by Edward Snowden. According to the leaked documents, the NSA intercepts the communications of over a billion people worldwide, many of whom are United States citizens, and tracks the movement of hundreds of millions of people using cellphones. Internationally, research has pointed to the NSA’s ability to surveil the domestic Internet traffic of foreign countries through “boomerang routing”.[18]

Contents

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History

Army predecessor

The origins of the National Security Agency can be traced back to April 28, 1917, three weeks after the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany in World War I. A code and cipher decryption unit was established as the Cable and Telegraph Section which was also known as the Cipher Bureau. It was headquartered in Washington, D.C. and was part of the war effort under the executive branch without direct Congressional authorization. During the course of the war it was relocated in the army’s organizational chart several times. On July 5, 1917, Herbert O. Yardley was assigned to head the unit. At that point, the unit consisted of Yardley and two civilian clerks. It absorbed the navy’s cryptoanalysis functions in July 1918. World War I ended on November 11, 1918, and MI-8 moved to New York City on May 20, 1919, where it continued intelligence activities as the Code Compilation Company under the direction of Yardley.[19][20]

Black Chamber

Western Union allowed MI-8 to monitor telegraphic communications passing through the company’s wires until 1929.[21]

Other “Black Chambers” were also found in Europe. They were established by the French and British governments to read the letters of targeted individuals, employing a variety of techniques to surreptitiously open, copy, and reseal correspondence before forwarding it to unsuspecting recipients.[24]

Despite the American Black Chamber’s initial successes, it was shut down in 1929 by U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who defended his decision by stating: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”.[21]

World War II and its aftermath

During World War II, the Signal Security Agency (SSA) was created to intercept and decipher the communications of the Axis powers.[25] When the war ended, the SSA was reorganized as the Army Security Agency (ASA), and it was placed under the leadership of the Director of Military Intelligence.[25]

A secret operation, code-named “MINARET“, was set up by the NSA to monitor the phone communications of Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, as well as major civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and prominent U.S. journalists and athletes who criticized the Vietnam War.[31] However, the project turned out to be controversial, and an internal review by the NSA concluded that its Minaret program was “disreputable if not outright illegal”.[31]

The NSA mounted a major effort to secure tactical communications among U.S. forces during the war with mixed success. The NESTOR family of compatible secure voice systems it developed was widely deployed during the Vietnam War, with about 30,000 NESTOR sets produced. However a variety of technical and operational problems limited their use, allowing the North Vietnamese to exploit intercepted U.S. communications.[32]:Vol I, p.79

Church Committee hearings

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, a congressional hearing in 1975 led by Sen. Frank Church[33] revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain’s SIGINT intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam war leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock.[34] Following the resignation of President Richard Nixon, there were several investigations of suspected misuse of FBI, CIA and NSA facilities.[35] Senator Frank Church uncovered previously unknown activity,[35]such as a CIA plot (ordered by the administration of President John F. Kennedy) to assassinate Fidel Castro.[36] The investigation also uncovered NSA’s wiretaps on targeted American citizens.[37]

In 1999, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA’s role in economic espionage in a report entitled ‘Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information’.[40] That year, the NSA founded the NSA Hall of Honor, a memorial at the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland.[41] The memorial is a, “tribute to the pioneers and heroes who have made significant and long-lasting contributions to American cryptology”.[41] NSA employees must be retired for more than fifteen years to qualify for the memorial.[41]

NSA’s infrastructure deteriorated in the 1990s as defense budget cuts resulted in maintenance deferrals. On January 24, 2000, NSA headquarters suffered a total network outage for three days caused by an overloaded network. Incoming traffic was successfully stored on agency servers, but it could not be directed and processed. The agency carried out emergency repairs at a cost of $3 million to get the system running again. (Some incoming traffic was also directed instead to Britain’s GCHQ for the time being.) Director Michael Hayden called the outage a “wake-up call” for the need to invest in the agency’s infrastructure.[42]

War on Terror

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the NSA created new IT systems to deal with the flood of information from new technologies like the Internet and cellphones. ThinThread contained advanced data mining capabilities. It also had a “privacy mechanism”; surveillance was stored encrypted; decryption required a warrant. The research done under this program may have contributed to the technology used in later systems. ThinThread was cancelled when Michael Hayden chose Trailblazer, which did not include ThinThread’s privacy system.[44]

Trailblazer Project ramped up in 2002. SAIC, Boeing, CSC, IBM, and Litton worked on it. Some NSA whistleblowers complained internally about major problems surrounding Trailblazer. This led to investigations by Congress and the NSA and DoD Inspectors General. The project was cancelled in early 2004. Several whistleblowers were later arrested and charged with violating federal espionage laws.

Turbulence started in 2005. It was developed in small, inexpensive “test” pieces, rather than one grand plan like Trailblazer. It also included offensive cyber-warfare capabilities, like injecting malware into remote computers. Congress criticized Turbulence in 2007 for having similar bureaucratic problems as Trailblazer.[45] It was to be a realization of information processing at higher speeds in cyberspace.[46]

The massive extent of the NSA’s spying, both foreign and domestic, was revealed to the public in a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents beginning in June 2013. Most of the disclosures were leaked by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.

Scope of surveillance

It was revealed that the NSA intercepts telephone and Internet communications of over a billion people worldwide, seeking information on terrorism as well as foreign politics, economics[47] and “commercial secrets”.[48] In a declassified document it was revealed that 17,835 phone lines were on an improperly permitted “alert list” from 2006 to 2009 in breach of compliance, which tagged these phone lines for daily monitoring.[49][50][51] Eleven percent of these monitored phone lines met the agency’s legal standard for “reasonably articulable suspicion” (RAS).[49][52]

A dedicated unit of the NSA locates targets for the CIA for extrajudicial assassination in the Middle East.[53] The NSA has also spied extensively on the European Union, the United Nations and numerous governments including allies and trading partners in Europe, South America and Asia.[54][55]

The NSA tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of cellphones per day, allowing it to map people’s movements and relationships in detail.[56]It reportedly has access to all communications made via Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk,[57] and collects hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts each year.[58] It has also managed to weaken much of the encryption used on the Internet (by collaborating with, coercing or otherwise infiltrating numerous technology companies), so that the majority of Internet privacy is now vulnerable to the NSA and other attackers.[59][60]

Domestically, the NSA collects and stores metadata records of phone calls,[61] including over 120 million US Verizon subscribers,[62] as well as Internet communications,[57] relying on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act whereby the entirety of US communications may be considered “relevant” to a terrorism investigation if it is expected that even a tiny minority may relate to terrorism.[63] The NSA supplies foreign intercepts to the DEA, IRS and other law enforcement agencies, who use these to initiate criminal investigations. Federal agents are then instructed to “recreate” the investigative trail via parallel construction.[64]

The NSA also spies on influential Muslims to obtain information that could be used to discredit them, such as their use of pornography. The targets, both domestic and abroad, are not suspected of any crime but hold religious or political views deemed “radical” by the NSA.[65]

Although NSA’s surveillance activities are controversial, government agencies and private enterprises have common needs, and sometimes cooperate at subtle and complex technical levels. Big data is becoming more advantageous, justifying the cost of required computer hardware, and social media lead the trend. The interests of NSA and Silicon Valley began to converge as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data and at the same time the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise. On the other hand, social media sites are growing as voluntary data mining operations on a scale that rivals or exceeds anything the government could attempt on its own.[66]

According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information provided by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, text messages, and online accounts that support the claim.[67]

Legal accountability

Despite President Obama’s claims that these programs have congressional oversight, members of Congress were unaware of the existence of these NSA programs or the secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, and have consistently been denied access to basic information about them.[68] Obama has also claimed that there are legal checks in place to prevent inappropriate access of data and that there have been no examples of abuse;[69] however, the secret FISC court charged with regulating the NSA’s activities is, according to its chief judge, incapable of investigating or verifying how often the NSA breaks even its own secret rules.[70] It has since been reported that the NSA violated its own rules on data access thousands of times a year, many of these violations involving large-scale data interceptions;[71] and that NSA officers have even used data intercepts to spy on love interests.[72] The NSA has “generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information” by illegally sharing its intercepts with other law enforcement agencies.[73] A March 2009 opinion of the FISC court, released by court order, states that protocols restricting data queries had been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can be fairly said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.”[74][75] In 2011 the same court noted that the “volume and nature” of the NSA’s bulk foreign Internet intercepts was “fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”.[73] Email contact lists (including those of US citizens) are collected at numerous foreign locations to work around the illegality of doing so on US soil.[58]

Legal opinions on the NSA’s bulk collection program have differed. In mid-December 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that the “almost-Orwellian” program likely violates the Constitution, and wrote, “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware ‘the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,’ would be aghast.”[76]

Later that month, U.S. District Judge William Pauley ruled that the NSA’s collection of telephone records is legal and valuable in the fight against terrorism. In his opinion, he wrote, “a bulk telephony metadata collection program [is] a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data” and noted that a similar collection of data prior to 9/11 might have prevented the attack.[77]

An October 2014 United Nations report condemned mass surveillance by the United States and other countries as violating multiple international treaties and conventions that guarantee core privacy rights.[78]

Official responses

On March 20, 2013 the Director of National Intelligence, Lieutenant General James Clapper, testified before Congress that the NSA does not wittingly collect any kind of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, but he retracted this in June after details of the PRISM program were published, and stated instead that meta-data of phone and Internet traffic are collected, but no actual message contents.[79] This was corroborated by the NSA Director, General Keith Alexander, before it was revealed that the XKeyscore program collects the contents of millions of emails from US citizens without warrant, as well as “nearly everything a user does on the Internet”. Alexander later admitted that “content” is collected, but stated that it is simply stored and never analyzed or searched unless there is “a nexus to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups”.[69]

Regarding the necessity of these NSA programs, Alexander stated on June 27 that the NSA’s bulk phone and Internet intercepts had been instrumental in preventing 54 terrorist “events”, including 13 in the US, and in all but one of these cases had provided the initial tip to “unravel the threat stream”.[80] On July 31 NSA Deputy Director John Inglis conceded to the Senate that these intercepts had not been vital in stopping any terrorist attacks, but were “close” to vital in identifying and convicting four San Diego men for sending US$8,930 to Al-Shabaab, a militia that conducts terrorism in Somalia.[81][82][83]

The U.S. government has aggressively sought to dismiss and challenge Fourth Amendment cases raised against it, and has granted retroactive immunity to ISPs and telecoms participating in domestic surveillance.[84][85] The U.S. military has acknowledged blocking access to parts of The Guardian website for thousands of defense personnel across the country,[86][87] and blocking the entire Guardian website for personnel stationed throughout Afghanistan, the Middle East, and South Asia.[88]

NSA also has an Inspector General, head of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a General Counsel, head of the Office of the General Counsel (OGC) and a Director of Compliance, who is head of the Office of the Director of Compliance (ODOC).[89]

Unlike other intelligence organizations such as CIA or DIA, NSA has always been particularly reticent concerning its internal organizational structure.

As of the mid-1990s, the National Security Agency was organized into five Directorates:

The Operations Directorate, which was responsible for SIGINT collection and processing.

The Technology and Systems Directorate, which develops new technologies for SIGINT collection and processing.

The Information Systems Security Directorate, which was responsible for NSA’s communications and information security missions.

The Plans, Policy and Programs Directorate, which provided staff support and general direction for the Agency.

The Support Services Directorate, which provided logistical and administrative support activities.[90]

Each of these directorates consisted of several groups or elements, designated by a letter. There were for example the A Group, which was responsible for all SIGINT operations against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and G Group, which was responsible for SIGINT related to all non-communist countries. These groups were divided in units designated by an additional number, like unit A5 for breaking Soviet codes, and G6, being the office for the Middle East, North Africa, Cuba, Central and South America.[91][92]

Structure

As of 2013, NSA has about a dozen directorates, which are designated by a letter, although not all of them are publicly known. The directorates are divided in divisions and units starting with the letter of the parent directorate, followed by a number for the division, the sub-unit or a sub-sub-unit.

F – Directorate only known from unit F6, the Special Collection Service (SCS), which is a joint program created by CIA and NSA in 1978 to facilitate clandestine activities such as bugging computers throughout the world, using the expertise of both agencies.[94]

G – Directorate only known from unit G112, the office that manages the Senior Span platform, attached to the U2 spy planes.[95]

J – Directorate only known from unit J2, the Cryptologic Intelligence Unit

L – Installation and Logistics

M – Human Resources

Q – Security and Counterintelligence

R – Research Directorate, which conducts research on signals intelligence and on information assurance for the U.S. Government.[96]

S – Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), which is responsible for the collection, analysis, production and dissemination of signals intelligence. This directorate is led by a director and a deputy director. The SID consists of the following divisions:

S1 – Customer Relations

S2 – Analysis and Production Centers, with the following so-called Product Lines:

S3 – Data Acquisition, with these divisions for the main collection programs:

S31 – Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services (CES)

S32 – Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which hacks into foreign computers to conduct cyber-espionage and reportedly is “the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA’s huge Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Directorate, consisting of over 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers.”[97]

S33 – Global Access Operations (GAO), which is responsible for intercepts from satellites and other international SIGINT platforms.[98] A tool which details and maps the information collected by this unit is code-named Boundless Informant.

S34 – Collections Strategies and Requirements Center

S35 – Special Source Operations (SSO), which is responsible for domestic and compartmented collection programs, like for example the PRISM program.[98] Special Source Operations is also mentioned in connection to the FAIRVIEW collection program.[99]

T – Technical Directorate (TD)

Directorate for Education and Training

Directorate for Corporate Leadership

Foreign Affairs Directorate, which acts as liaison with foreign intelligence services, counter-intelligence centers and the UKUSA-partners.

Acquisitions and Procurement Directorate

Information Sharing Services (ISS), led by a chief and a deputy chief.[100]

In the year 2000, a leadership team was formed, consisting of the Director, the Deputy Director and the Directors of the Signals Intelligence (SID), the Information Assurance (IAD) and the Technical Directorate (TD). The chiefs of other main NSA divisions became associate directors of the senior leadership team.[101]

After president George W. Bush initiated the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP) in 2001, the NSA created a 24-hour Metadata Analysis Center (MAC), followed in 2004 by the Advanced Analysis Division (AAD), with the mission of analyzing content, Internet metadata and telephone metadata. Both units were part of the Signals Intelligence Directorate.[102]

A 2016 proposal would combine the Signals Intelligence Directorate with the Information Assurance Directorate into a Directorate of Operations.[103]

Watch centers

The NSA maintains at least two watch centers:

National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which is the NSA’s current operations center and focal point for time-sensitive SIGINT reporting for the United States SIGINT System (USSS). This center was established in 1968 as the National SIGINT Watch Center (NSWC) and renamed into National SIGINT Operations Center (NSOC) in 1973. This “nerve center of the NSA” got its current name in 1996.[104]

NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center (NTOC), which is the primary NSA/CSS partner for Department of Homeland Security response to cyber incidents. The NTOC establishes real-time network awareness and threat characterization capabilities to forecast, alert, and attribute malicious activity and enable the coordination of Computer Network Operations. The NTOC was established in 2004 as a joint Information Assurance and Signals Intelligence project.[105]

Employees

The number of NSA employees is officially classified[4] but there are several sources providing estimates. In 1961, NSA had 59,000 military and civilian employees, which grew to 93,067 in 1969, of which 19,300 worked at the headquarters at Fort Meade. In the early 1980s NSA had roughly 50,000 military and civilian personnel. By 1989 this number had grown again to 75,000, of which 25,000 worked at the NSA headquarters. Between 1990 and 1995 the NSA’s budget and workforce were cut by one third, which led to a substantial loss of experience.[106]

In 2012, the NSA said more than 30,000 employees worked at Fort Meade and other facilities.[2] In 2012, John C. Inglis, the deputy director, said that the total number of NSA employees is “somewhere between 37,000 and one billion” as a joke,[4] and stated that the agency is “probably the biggest employer of introverts.”[4] In 2013 Der Spiegel stated that the NSA had 40,000 employees.[5] More widely, it has been described as the world’s largest single employer of mathematicians.[107] Some NSA employees form part of the workforce of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that provides the NSA with satellite signals intelligence.

Security issues

The NSA received criticism early on in 1960 after two agents had defected to the Soviet Union. Investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and a special subcommittee of the United States House Committee on Armed Services revealed severe cases of ignorance in personnel security regulations, prompting the former personnel director and the director of security to step down and leading to the adoption of stricter security practices.[109] Nonetheless, security breaches reoccurred only a year later when in an issue of Izvestia of July 23, 1963, a former NSA employee published several cryptologic secrets.

The very same day, an NSA clerk-messenger committed suicide as ongoing investigations disclosed that he had sold secret information to the Soviets on a regular basis. The reluctance of Congressional houses to look into these affairs had prompted a journalist to write, “If a similar series of tragic blunders occurred in any ordinary agency of Government an aroused public would insist that those responsible be officially censured, demoted, or fired.” David Kahn criticized the NSA’s tactics of concealing its doings as smug and the Congress’ blind faith in the agency’s right-doing as shortsighted, and pointed out the necessity of surveillance by the Congress to prevent abuse of power.[109]

Edward Snowden‘s leaking of the existence of PRISM in 2013 caused the NSA to institute a “two-man rule“, where two system administrators are required to be present when one accesses certain sensitive information.[108] Snowden claims he suggested such a rule in 2009.[110]

Polygraphin

The NSA conducts polygraph tests of employees. For new employees, the tests are meant to discover enemy spies who are applying to the NSA and to uncover any information that could make an applicant pliant to coercion.[111] As part of the latter, historically EPQs or “embarrassing personal questions” about sexual behavior had been included in the NSA polygraph.[111] The NSA also conducts five-year periodic reinvestigation polygraphs of employees, focusing on counterintelligence programs. In addition the NSA conducts periodic polygraph investigations in order to find spies and leakers; those who refuse to take them may receive “termination of employment”, according to a 1982 memorandum from the director of the NSA.[112]

NSA-produced video on the polygraph process

There are also “special access examination” polygraphs for employees who wish to work in highly sensitive areas, and those polygraphs cover counterintelligence questions and some questions about behavior.[112] NSA’s brochure states that the average test length is between two and four hours.[113] A 1983 report of the Office of Technology Assessment stated that “It appears that the NSA [National Security Agency] (and possibly CIA) use the polygraph not to determine deception or truthfulness per se, but as a technique of interrogation to encourage admissions.”[114]Sometimes applicants in the polygraph process confess to committing felonies such as murder, rape, and selling of illegal drugs. Between 1974 and 1979, of the 20,511 job applicants who took polygraph tests, 695 (3.4%) confessed to previous felony crimes; almost all of those crimes had been undetected.[111]

In 2010 the NSA produced a video explaining its polygraph process.[115] The video, ten minutes long, is titled “The Truth About the Polygraph” and was posted to the Web site of the Defense Security Service. Jeff Stein of The Washington Post said that the video portrays “various applicants, or actors playing them — it’s not clear — describing everything bad they had heard about the test, the implication being that none of it is true.”[116] AntiPolygraph.org argues that the NSA-produced video omits some information about the polygraph process; it produced a video responding to the NSA video.[115] George Maschke, the founder of the Web site, accused the NSA polygraph video of being “Orwellian“.[116]

After Edward Snowden revealed his identity in 2013, the NSA began requiring polygraphing of employees once per quarter.[117]

Arbitrary firing

The number of exemptions from legal requirements has been criticized. When in 1964 the Congress was hearing a bill giving the director of the NSA the power to fire at will any employee,The Washington Post wrote: “This is the very definition of arbitrariness. It means that an employee could be discharged and disgraced on the basis of anonymous allegations without the slightest opportunity to defend himself.” Yet, the bill was accepted by an overwhelming majority.[109]

When the NSA was created, the agency had no emblem and used that of the Department of Defense.[119] The agency adopted its first of two emblems in 1963.[119] The current NSA insignia has been in use since 1965, when then-Director, LTG Marshall S. Carter (USA) ordered the creation of a device to represent the agency.[120]

The NSA’s flag consists of the agency’s seal on a light blue background.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service Cryptologic Memorial honors and remembers the fallen personnel, both military and civilian, of these intelligence missions.[122] It is made of black granite, and has 171 names carved into it, as of 2013 .[122] It is located at NSA headquarters. A tradition of declassifying the stories of the fallen was begun in 2001.[122]

NSANet (NSA’s intranet)

NSANet stands for National Security Agency Network and is the official NSA intranet.[123] It is a classified network,[124] for information up to the level of TS/SCI[125] to support the use and sharing of intelligence data between NSA and the signals intelligence agencies of the four other nations of the Five Eyes partnership. The management of NSANet has been delegated to the Central Security Service Texas (CSSTEXAS).[126]

NSANet is a highly secured computer network consisting of fiber-optic and satellite communication channels which are almost completely separated from the public Internet. The network allows NSA personnel and civilian and military intelligence analysts anywhere in the world to have access to the agency’s systems and databases. This access is tightly controlled and monitored. For example, every keystroke is logged, activities are audited at random and downloading and printing of documents from NSANet are recorded.[127]

In 1998, NSANet, along with NIPRNET and SIPRNET, had “significant problems with poor search capabilities, unorganized data and old information”.[128] In 2004, the network was reported to have used over twenty commercial off-the-shelf operating systems.[129] Some universities that do highly sensitive research are allowed to connect to it.[130]

The thousands of Top Secret internal NSA documents that were taken by Edward Snowden in 2013 were stored in “a file-sharing location on the NSA’s intranet site” so they could easily be read online by NSA personnel. Everyone with a TS/SCI-clearance had access to these documents and as a system administrator, Snowden was responsible for moving accidentally misplaced highly sensitive documents to more secure storage locations.[131]

National Computer Security Center

The DoD Computer Security Center was founded in 1981 and renamed the National Computer Security Center (NCSC) in 1985. NCSC was responsible for computer security throughout the federal government.[132] NCSC was part of NSA,[133] and during the late 1980s and the 1990s, NSA and NCSC published Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria in a six-foot high Rainbow Series of books that detailed trusted computing and network platform specifications.[134] The Rainbow books were replaced by the Common Criteria, however, in the early 2000s.[134]

Facilities

Headquarters

National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, 2013

Headquarters for the National Security Agency is located at 39°6′32″N76°46′17″W in Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, although it is separate from other compounds and agencies that are based within this same military installation. Ft. Meade is about 20 mi (32 km) southwest of Baltimore,[135] and 25 mi (40 km) northeast of Washington, DC.[136] The NSA has its own exit off Maryland Route 295 South labeled “NSA Employees Only”.[137][138] The exit may only be used by people with the proper clearances, and security vehicles parked along the road guard the entrance.[139]

NSA is the largest employer in the U.S. state of Maryland, and two-thirds of its personnel work at Ft. Meade.[140] Built on 350 acres (140 ha; 0.55 sq mi)[141] of Ft. Meade’s 5,000 acres (2,000 ha; 7.8 sq mi),[142] the site has 1,300 buildings and an estimated 18,000 parking spaces.[136][143]

The main NSA headquarters and operations building is what James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets, describes as “a modern boxy structure” that appears similar to “any stylish office building.”[144] The building is covered with one-way dark glass, which is lined with copper shielding in order to prevent espionage by trapping in signals and sounds.[144] It contains 3,000,000 square feet (280,000 m2), or more than 68 acres (28 ha), of floor space; Bamford said that the U.S. Capitol “could easily fit inside it four times over.”[144]

The facility has over 100 watchposts,[145] one of them being the visitor control center, a two-story area that serves as the entrance.[144] At the entrance, a white pentagonal structure,[146] visitor badges are issued to visitors and security clearances of employees are checked.[147] The visitor center includes a painting of the NSA seal.[146]

The OPS2A building, the tallest building in the NSA complex and the location of much of the agency’s operations directorate, is accessible from the visitor center. Bamford described it as a “dark glass Rubik’s Cube“.[148] The facility’s “red corridor” houses non-security operations such as concessions and the drug store. The name refers to the “red badge” which is worn by someone without a security clearance. The NSA headquarters includes a cafeteria, a credit union, ticket counters for airlines and entertainment, a barbershop, and a bank.[146] NSA headquarters has its own post office, fire department, and police force.[149][150][151]

Power consumption

Due to massive amounts of data processing, NSA is the largest electricity consumer in Maryland.[140]

Following a major power outage in 2000, in 2003 and in follow-ups through 2007, The Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA was at risk of electrical overload because of insufficient internal electrical infrastructure at Fort Meade to support the amount of equipment being installed. This problem was apparently recognized in the 1990s but not made a priority, and “now the agency’s ability to keep its operations going is threatened.”[153]

Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE, now Constellation Energy) provided NSA with 65 to 75 megawatts at Ft. Meade in 2007, and expected that an increase of 10 to 15 megawatts would be needed later that year.[154] In 2011, NSA at Ft. Meade was Maryland’s largest consumer of power.[140] In 2007, as BGE’s largest customer, NSA bought as much electricity as Annapolis, the capital city of Maryland.[153]

One estimate put the potential for power consumption by the new Utah Data Center at US$40 million per year.[155]

History of headquarters

When the agency was established, its headquarters and cryptographic center were in the Naval Security Station in Washington, D.C. The COMINT functions were located in Arlington Hall in Northern Virginia, which served as the headquarters of the U.S. Army‘s cryptographic operations.[156]Because the Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear bomb and because the facilities were crowded, the federal government wanted to move several agencies, including the AFSA/NSA. A planning committee considered Fort Knox, but Fort Meade, Maryland, was ultimately chosen as NSA headquarters because it was far enough away from Washington, D.C. in case of a nuclear strike and was close enough so its employees would not have to move their families.[157]

Construction of additional buildings began after the agency occupied buildings at Ft. Meade in the late 1950s, which they soon outgrew.[157] In 1963 the new headquarters building, nine stories tall, opened. NSA workers referred to the building as the “Headquarters Building” and since the NSA management occupied the top floor, workers used “Ninth Floor” to refer to their leaders.[158] COMSEC remained in Washington, D.C., until its new building was completed in 1968.[157] In September 1986, the Operations 2A and 2B buildings, both copper-shielded to prevent eavesdropping, opened with a dedication by President Ronald Reagan.[159] The four NSA buildings became known as the “Big Four.”[159] The NSA director moved to 2B when it opened.[159]

On March 30, 2015, shortly before 9 am, a stolen sports utility vehicle approached an NSA police vehicle blocking the road near the gate of Fort Meade, after it was told to leave the area. NSA officers fired on the SUV, killing the 27-year-old driver, Ricky Hall (a transgender person also known as Mya), and seriously injuring his 20-year-old male passenger. An NSA officer’s arm was injured when Hall subsequently crashed into his vehicle.[160][161]

The two, dressed in women’s clothing after a night of partying at a motel with the man they’d stolen the SUV from that morning, “attempted to drive a vehicle into the National Security Agency portion of the installation without authorization”, according to an NSA statement.[162] FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson said the incident is not believed to be related to terrorism.[163]In June 2015 the FBI closed its investigation into the incident and federal prosecutors have declined to bring charges against anyone involved.[164]

An anonymous police official told The Washington Post, “This was not a deliberate attempt to breach the security of NSA. This was not a planned attack.” The two are believed to have made a wrong turn off the highway, while fleeing from the motel after stealing the vehicle. A small amount of cocaine was found in the SUV. A local CBS reporter initially said a gun was found,[165]but her later revision does not.[166] Dozens of journalists were corralled into a parking lot blocks away from the scene, and were barred from photographing the area.[167]

NSA held a groundbreaking ceremony at Ft. Meade in May 2013 for its High Performance Computing Center 2, expected to open in 2016.[169] Called Site M, the center has a 150 megawatt power substation, 14 administrative buildings and 10 parking garages.[149] It cost $3.2 billion and covers 227 acres (92 ha; 0.355 sq mi).[149] The center is 1,800,000 square feet (17 ha; 0.065 sq mi)[149] and initially uses 60 megawatts of electricity.[170]

On January 6, 2011 a groundbreaking ceremony was held to begin construction on NSA’s first Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (CNCI) Data Center, known as the “Utah Data Center” for short. The $1.5B data center is being built at Camp Williams, Utah, located 25 miles (40 km) south of Salt Lake City, and will help support the agency’s National Cyber-security Initiative.[172] It is expected to be operational by September 2013.[155]

In 2009, to protect its assets and to access more electricity, NSA sought to decentralize and expand its existing facilities in Ft. Meade and Menwith Hill,[173] the latter expansion expected to be completed by 2015.[174]

NSA operates RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom, which was, according to BBC News in 2007, the largest electronic monitoring station in the world.[182] Planned in 1954, and opened in 1960, the base covered 562 acres (227 ha; 0.878 sq mi) in 1999.[183]

The agency’s European Cryptologic Center (ECC), with 240 employees in 2011, is headquartered at a US military compound in Griesheim, near Frankfurt in Germany. A 2011 NSA report indicates that the ECC is responsible for the “largest analysis and productivity in Europe” and focusses on various priorities, including Africa, Europe, the Middle East and counterterrorism operations.[184]

Thailand

Thailand is a “3rd party partner” of the NSA along with nine other nations.[186] These are non-English-speaking countries that have made security agreements for the exchange of SIGINT raw material and end product reports.

Thailand is the site of at least two US SIGINT collection stations. One is at the US Embassy in Bangkok, a joint NSA-CIA Special Collection Service (SCS) unit. It presumably eavesdrops on foreign embassies, governmental communications, and other targets of opportunity.[187]

The second installation is a FORNSAT (foreign satellite interception) station in the Thai city of Khon Kaen. It is codenamed INDRA, but has also been referred to as LEMONWOOD.[187] The station is approximately 40 ha (100 acres) in size and consists of a large 3,700–4,600 m2 (40,000–50,000 ft2) operations building on the west side of the ops compound and four radome-enclosed parabolic antennas. Possibly two of the radome-enclosed antennas are used for SATCOM intercept and two antennas used for relaying the intercepted material back to NSA. There is also a PUSHER-type circularly-disposed antenna array (CDAA) array just north of the ops compound.[188][189]

NSA activated Khon Kaen in October 1979. Its mission was to eavesdrop on the radio traffic of Chinese army and air force units in southern China, especially in and around the city of Kunming in Yunnan Province. Back in the late 1970s the base consisted only of a small CDAA antenna array that was remote-controlled via satellite from the NSA listening post at Kunia, Hawaii, and a small force of civilian contractors from Bendix Field Engineering Corp. whose job it was to keep the antenna array and satellite relay facilities up and running 24/7.[188]

According to the papers of the late General William Odom, the INDRA facility was upgraded in 1986 with a new British-made PUSHER CDAA antenna as part of an overall upgrade of NSA and Thai SIGINT facilities whose objective was to spy on the neighboring communist nations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.[188]

The base apparently fell into disrepair in the 1990s as China and Vietnam became more friendly towards the US, and by 2002 archived satellite imagery showed that the PUSHER CDAA antenna had been torn down, perhaps indicating that the base had been closed. At some point in the period since 9/11, the Khon Kaen base was reactivated and expanded to include a sizeable SATCOM intercept mission. It is likely that the NSA presence at Khon Kaen is relatively small, and that most of the work is done by civilian contractors.[188]

Mission

NSA’s eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications.[190]

According to the Washington Post, “[e]very day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases.”[191]

As part of the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54), signed on January 8, 2008 by President Bush, the NSA became the lead agency to monitor and protect all of the federal government’s computer networks from cyber-terrorism.[9]

Operations

Operations by the National Security Agency can be divided in three types:

Collection overseas, which falls under the responsibility of the Global Access Operations (GAO) division.

During the early 1970s, the first of what became more than eight large satellite communications dishes were installed at Menwith Hill.[196] Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell reported in 1988 on the ECHELON surveillance program, an extension of the UKUSA Agreement on global signals intelligence SIGINT, and detailed how the eavesdropping operations worked.[197] In November 3, 1999 the BBC reported that they had confirmation from the Australian Government of the existence of a powerful “global spying network” code-named Echelon, that could “eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet” with Britain and the United States as the chief protagonists. They confirmed that Menwith Hill was “linked directly to the headquarters of the US National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade in Maryland”.[198]

NSA’s United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibited the interception or collection of information about “… U.S. persons, entities, corporations or organizations….” without explicit written legal permission from the United States Attorney General when the subject is located abroad, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when within U.S. borders. Alleged Echelon-related activities, including its use for motives other than national security, including political and industrial espionage, received criticism from countries outside the UKUSA alliance.[199][200]

Other SIGINT operations overseas

The NSA is also involved in planning to blackmail people with “SEXINT“, intelligence gained about a potential target’s sexual activity and preferences. Those targeted had not committed any apparent crime nor were charged with one.[201]

The Real Time Regional Gateway is a data collection program introduced in 2005 in Iraq by NSA during the Iraq War that consisted of gathering all electronic communication, storing it, then searching and otherwise analyzing it. It was effective in providing information about Iraqi insurgents who had eluded less comprehensive techniques.[203] This “collect it all” strategy introduced by NSA director, Keith B. Alexander, is believed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian to be the model for the comprehensive worldwide mass archiving of communications which NSA is engaged in as of 2013.[204]

BoundlessInformant

Edward Snowden revealed in June 2013 that between February 8 and March 8, 2013, the NSA collected about 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items throughout the world, as was displayed in charts from an internal NSA tool codenamed Boundless Informant. It was reported that some of these data reflected eavesdropping on citizens in countries like Germany, Spain and France.[205]

Domestic activity

NSA’s mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333 in 1981, is to collect information that constitutes “foreign intelligence or counterintelligence” while not “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons”. NSA has declared that it relies on the FBI to collect information on foreign intelligence activities within the borders of the United States, while confining its own activities within the United States to the embassies and missions of foreign nations.[212] The appearance of a ‘Domestic Surveillance Directorate’ of the NSA was soon exposed as a hoax in 2013.[213][214]

NSA’s domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for example held in October 2011, citing multiple Supreme Court precedents, that the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to the contents of all communications, whatever the means, because “a person’s private communications are akin to personal papers.”[215] However, these protections do not apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA’s foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law.[216] The specific requirements for domestic surveillance operations are contained in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which does not extend protection to non-U.S. citizens located outside of U.S. territory.[216]

George W. Bush administration

George W. Bush, president during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, approved the Patriot Act shortly after the attacks to take anti-terrorist security measures. Title 1, 2, and 9 specifically authorized measures that would be taken by the NSA. These titles granted enhanced domestic security against terrorism, surveillance procedures, and improved intelligence, respectively. On March 10, 2004, there was a debate between President Bush and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Acting Attorney General James Comey. The Attorney Generals were unsure if the NSA’s programs could be considered constitutional. They threatened to resign over the matter, but ultimately the NSA’s programs continued.[217] On March 11, 2004, President Bush signed a new authorization for mass surveillance of Internet records, in addition to the surveillance of phone records.This allowed the president to be able to override laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which protected civilians from mass surveillance. In addition to this, President Bush also signed that the measures of mass surveillance were also retroactively in place.[218]

One such surveillance program, authorized by the U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 of President George Bush, was the Highlander Project undertaken for the National Security Agency by the U.S. Army 513th Military Intelligence Brigade. NSA relayed telephone (including cell phone) conversations obtained from ground, airborne, and satellite monitoring stations to various U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Officers, including the 201st Military Intelligence Battalion. Conversations of citizens of the U.S. were intercepted, along with those of other nations.[220]

As a result of the USA Freedom Act passed by Congress in June 2015, the NSA had to shut down its bulk phone surveillance program on November 29 of the same year. The USA Freedom Act forbids the NSA to collect metadata and content of phone calls unless it has a warrant for terrorism investigation. In that case the agency has to ask the telecom companies for the record, which will only be kept for six months.

AT&T Internet monitoring

In May 2006, Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee, alleged that his company had cooperated with NSA in installing Narus hardware to replace the FBI Carnivore program, to monitor network communications including traffic between American citizens.[227]

Data mining

NSA was reported in 2008 to use its computing capability to analyze “transactional” data that it regularly acquires from other government agencies, which gather it under their own jurisdictional authorities. As part of this effort, NSA now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic email data, web addresses from Internet searches, bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel records, and telephone data, according to current and former intelligence officials interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The sender, recipient, and subject line of emails can be included, but the content of the messages or of phone calls are not.[228]

A 2013 advisory group for the Obama administration, seeking to reform NSA spying programs following the revelations of documents released by Edward J. Snowden.[229] mentioned in ‘Recommendation 30’ on page 37, “…that the National Security Council staff should manage an interagency process to review on a regular basis the activities of the US Government regarding attacks that exploit a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application.” Retired cyber security expert Richard A. Clarke was a group member and stated on April 11 that NSA had no advance knowledge of Heartbleed.[230]

Illegally obtained evidence

In August 2013 it was revealed that a 2005 IRS training document showed that NSA intelligence intercepts and wiretaps, both foreign and domestic, were being supplied to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and were illegally used to launch criminal investigations of US citizens. Law enforcement agents were directed to conceal how the investigations began and recreate an apparently legal investigative trail by re-obtaining the same evidence by other means.[231][232]

Barack Obama administration

In the months leading to April 2009, the NSA intercepted the communications of American citizens, including a Congressman, although the Justice Department believed that the interception was unintentional. The Justice Department then took action to correct the issues and bring the program into compliance with existing laws.[233] United States Attorney General Eric Holder resumed the program according to his understanding of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendment of 2008, without explaining what had occurred.[234]

Polls conducted in June 2013 found divided results among Americans regarding NSA’s secret data collection.[235]Rasmussen Reports found that 59% of Americans disapprove,[236]Gallup found that 53% disapprove,[237] and Pew found that 56% are in favor of NSA data collection.[238]

Section 215 metadata collection

On April 25, 2013, the NSA obtained a court order requiring Verizon‘s Business Network Services to provide metadata on all calls in its system to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period, as reported by The Guardian on June 6, 2013. This information includes “the numbers of both parties on a call … location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls” but not “[t]he contents of the conversation itself”. The order relies on the so-called “business records” provision of the Patriot Act.[239][240]

In August 2013, following the Snowden leaks, new details about the NSA’s data mining activity were revealed. Reportedly, the majority of emails into or out of the United States are captured at “selected communications links” and automatically analyzed for keywords or other “selectors”. Emails that do not match are deleted.[241]

The utility of such a massive metadata collection in preventing terrorist attacks is disputed. Many studies reveal the dragnet like system to be ineffective. One such report, released by the New America Foundation concluded that after an analysis of 225 terrorism cases, the NSA “had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”[242]

Defenders of the program say that while metadata alone can’t provide all the information necessary to prevent an attack, it assures the ability to “connect the dots”[243] between suspect foreign numbers and domestic numbers with a speed only the NSA’s software is capable of. One benefit of this is quickly being able to determine the difference between suspicious activity and real threats.[citation needed] As an example, NSA director General Keith Alexander mentioned at the annual Cybersecurity Summit in 2013, that metadata analysis of domestic phone call records after the Boston Marathon bombing helped determine that[clarification needed] another attack in New York was baseless.[243]

In addition to doubts about its effectiveness, many people argue that the collection of metadata is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. As of 2015, the collection process remains legal and grounded in the ruling from Smith v. Maryland (1979). A prominent opponent of the data collection and its legality is U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who issued a report in 2013[244] in which he stated: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval…Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment”.

Under the PRISM program, which started in 2007,[245][246] NSA gathers Internet communications from foreign targets from nine major U.S. Internet-based communication service providers: Microsoft,[247]Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Data gathered include email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, VoIP chats such as Skype, and file transfers.

July 2015 – WikiLeaks: Espionage against German federal ministries[edit]

In July 2015, WikiLeaks published documents, which showed that NSA spied on federal German ministries since 1990s.[249][250] Even Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s cellphones and phone of her predecessors had been intercepted.[251]

Claims of prevented terrorist attacks

Former NSA director General Keith Alexander claimed that in September 2009 the NSA prevented Najibullah Zazi and his friends from carrying out a terrorist attack.[252] However, this claim has been debunked and no evidence has been presented demonstrating that the NSA has ever been instrumental in preventing a terrorist attack.[253][254][255][256]

Besides the more traditional ways of eavesdropping in order to collect signals intelligence, NSA is also engaged in hacking computers, smartphones and their networks. These operations are conducted by the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division.

NSA’s China hacking group

According to the Foreign Policy magazine, “… the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People’s Republic of China.”[257][258]

Syrian internet blackout

Suspected responsibility for hacking operations by the Equation Group[edit]

The espionage group named the Equation Group, described by discoverers Kaspersky Labs as one of the most advanced (if not the most advanced) in the world as of 2015,[260]:31 and connected to over 500 malware infections in at least 42 countries over many years, is suspected of being a part of NSA.[261]